Capital Pointe buyers can get down payments back

Law firm holding money in trust surprised more haven’t applied

The phone number for the Capital Pointe sales office is out of service. But the front door works just fine.

Inside, across from the excavation pit at Albert Street and Victoria Avenue, there’s a scale model of the building that should have been there long ago — according to the plans first laid down in 2010.

There is a friendly man who works there. He does not want to provide his name.

But he’s ready to admit that sales have slowed down as the project faces delays and legal issues.

He’s adamant about one thing: If someone wants their money back, they can get it. Capital Pointe, and its lead developer Fortress Real Developments, are “obliging ” with their customers.

He said a “handful” of purchasers with down payments on condo units have demanded exactly that. The money is in the hands of a law office a short drive to the east, held securely in a trust account.

Rodger Linka, counsel at Linka Howe Law Offices, confirmed that his firm has the money. He said he doesn’t understand why so few people have demanded repayment.

“At the current state of construction, frankly, I would have expected more,” he said.

“I’m quite surprised how there is a group that seem to be quite tenacious about keeping their investment in Capital Pointe and hoping it will work.”

He said Capital Pointe has always been cooperative.

“In my experience in the recent past, meaning the past five years, I’ve never had an issue with Capital Pointe raising roadblocks on the release of money,” he said.

That has not been the experience of Tyler Beyer.

In 2010, Beyer was among the first to put a down payment on a condo unit in the proposed 27-storey tower.

But he soon came to believe the project was “going nowhere.” He said he’d tried and failed to reclaim his $20,000.

According to Beyer, the sales office didn’t return his calls. Neither did people higher up. One of the few times he got through, he said they pointed to an offer given to buyers years before.

“They said no, you missed that point, your money’s here now,” Beyer recalled.

But then the police raids hit the news. The RCMP white-collar crime unit had executed a search warrant on Fortress’s offices near Toronto. Beyer took action within days.

“I contacted my lawyer, he wrote them a letter and it was a matter of a couple of weeks,” he said. “They had the money back to me; there was no issues at all; they never asked any questions.

“The money isn’t gone.”

Linka said the process is easier than Beyer related.

“They don’t need a lawyer,” he said. “They just need to make the request to Capital Pointe and then Capital Pointe notifies me and we release their money. It’s always been that way.”

In an email response to the Leader-post, a lawyer said there is now too much “hysteria” around Capital Pointe. Neil Abbott, who represents the site owner Westgate Properties, said he knows how important the project is to Regina.

“I have come to appreciate the significance of the site to the Queen City,” said Abbott, who visited the excavation pit for the first time during an appeal hearing last month.

In his view, what he saw there should not be called a hole, but a “safe and common construction feature.”

He also said there is confusion over people like Beyer. While some call them investors, they are really purchasers.

“Purchasers’ deposits are not used for construction or project cost purposes,” Abbott wrote, before explaining the trust arrangement run out of Linka Howe.

He said the deposits will remain in trust “until occupancy.”

Real investors risk their savings to fund building costs through mortgage loans. Abbott expects they have “considered risk as a key element of investing.”

“For investors this a private matter,” he said.

For Wilhem Michel, 61, it is a very serious matter.

When he immigrated to Canada, Michel brought along the savings he earned as a merchant in Haiti. He invested them in two Fortress properties.

He earned interest, and invested roughly $90,000 in another project: Capital Pointe.

Now, he said two of the projects are facing serious delays, and all three have ceased paying him interest. But that’s not what worries Michel. He’s frightened for his original investment, especially after learning that Fortress’s lead broker was stripped of its licence for what the Financial Post called “risky” mortgage investments.

“They can keep the interest,” he said in a French interview translated by the Leader-post. “If I could just have $200,000 of my $315,000, that’s my retirement. I have been in Canada for 10 years and I don’t have a pension.”

Michel, who says he has only one foot because of a childhood case of polio, is now working as an Uber driver in Ottawa. He said he considers himself “ruined.”

“Quite simply,” he said, “I am going to die poor.”